| 1. | 2/5/2008 1:56:00 AM | I am unsure what you mean by "learning communities". I would like to see this better defined. |
| 2. | 2/5/2008 3:48:00 AM | We need to be on the same page so that our students get the best. |
| 3. | 2/5/2008 4:11:00 AM | The loss of grade level meetings has greatly reduced the effectiveness and activeness of learning community. Assessment has dominated instruction which is unfortunate. |
| 4. | 2/5/2008 2:08:00 PM | Good questions. They do drive discussion, but these questions should be revisited by all of us. More time for evaluation - report cards are burdensome. |
| 5. | 2/5/2008 4:08:00 PM | This is education at its best! |
| 6. | 2/5/2008 4:58:00 PM | I think we are pretty good at this already. |
| 7. | 2/5/2008 6:53:00 PM | This goes along with professional development and differentiated instruction |
| 8. | 2/5/2008 8:44:00 PM | Assessment comes in many forms, and we already do a lot. We don't necessarily need more, the results just need to be discussed and instruction changed because of it. |
| 9. | 2/5/2008 9:28:00 PM | I feel we do a great deal of assessing in our district already. I know about my students. I know how much they have grown since the beginning of the year and where they need to go. I hope we remember that assessments can take many forms: projects, observations, conferences with students and shouldn't all be paper/pencial or computerized tests. These do not show how much our students have come for ALL students! Alignment in elementary math does need to be revisited, as does alignment in spelling. We also need to make sure that the new social studies curriculum is aligned appropriately K-5 and not missing key areas essential for understanding. |
| 10. | 2/5/2008 9:58:00 PM | I believe that "community" is the key to:
illiminating bullying
better test scores
more homework completion
no tatteling
better overall respect for adults and peers within the learning area
Building this takes TIME, and my concern is when instructional expectations are continuing to rise (minutes), where do we find this time. It seems to me that we need to START with this, and topple down. |
| 11. | 2/5/2008 11:03:00 PM | Are the Lit meetings really necessary every month or would it be more effective to alternate lit meetings with grade level meetings where we could have discussions about assessment etc.. |
| 12. | 2/6/2008 3:05:00 AM | Important, but let's not only focus on testing situations. Some kids don't test well. We need to look at the whole child. |
| 13. | 2/7/2008 5:36:00 PM | This all sounds good and it is off to a great start. I struggle with getting help for the kids who need remediation. For one example; I follow the Math curiculum and pacing, then at the end of the quarter I give the quarter test. I log the information into the computer. I have some students who struggle in Math. Where is that remediation/extra help for the students who are struggling? |
| 14. | 3/5/2008 7:40:00 PM | It seems like we are doing this all of the time. I would suggest that grade five have more opportunities to meet with middle school teachers. |
| 15. | 3/5/2008 8:57:00 PM | I believe it would be a high priority if it were stated like this: alignment, assessment, intervention/challenge. However, assessment cannot always be a number we place in a table/chart. Anecdotal records/charts are more useful at times when deciding on interventions/challenges. |
| 16. | 3/6/2008 4:52:00 PM | The 3 Questions is a good way to improve student learning. The problem is: teachers know who does not understand or who needs more instruction in certain areas, but there isn’t time to go back to reteach those students. Especially in the area of math, the pacing is so fast and there are so many different skills that need to be taught, introduced, and worked on to the mastery level, that there are not enough days to get that information into the students’ heads (especially if they do not understand it the first time.) We keep testing them to make sure we know what they know, but we do not have the extra time to go back to reteach them if they do not understand a concept. Likewise, when students are sick, it is really hard to catch them up if they have fallen behind. If you take them out of a math class, they miss that day’s lesson and then are twice as far behind. It is somewhat easier to give students challenging work if they already understand the concepts because those types of students typically can work more independently. My concern at this point is not the higher level students, but the ones needing remediation that seem not to get the attention they need. |
| 17. | 3/6/2008 5:05:00 PM | I think we are redundent with assessments. The report card/ progress report should answer these assessment questions. If not, then change the progress/report card so it does and we use it as the source. Who are the quarterly assessments really for? They are afterall only snap shots. don't our unit tests do a better job of this as does the information on the report/progress reports? |
| 18. | 3/6/2008 6:38:00 PM | Test, test, test!When do we have time to teach? |
| 19. | 3/6/2008 7:02:00 PM | We need more planning time with grade level partners to meet this. |
| 20. | 3/6/2008 8:05:00 PM | see comment above |
| 21. | 3/6/2008 8:33:00 PM | I would love to have some of our professional development occur through grade level planning and sharing. |
| 22. | 3/6/2008 10:37:00 PM | I just don't want to keep feeling like we are assessing more than teaching. |
| 23. | 3/6/2008 10:51:00 PM | Giving us more TIME to align, analyze assessments, and create lessons that respond to the remediation and challenge our students need.... none of this can happen effetively without TIME. |
| 24. | 3/18/2008 2:10:00 PM | I agree I think that this if very important to students and parents, but here again this has barely started to be implemented in our curriculums and we are pushing to add other ideas. There is less and less time to prepare for classes and research and develop materials for our own classes and speciality areas. I here all the time about people teaching in areas where they have minimal knowledge and backgroud of the subject area and are expected to make their classes interesting and prepare their students with information and knowledge that is accurate and well developed. Oh! Please do not give me the response that this is part of my job outside of my regular school day and that I or anyone else should dedicate their lives to their jobs. This might work for some people, but I don't think it does a lot for mental or emotional health and well being. |
| 25. | 3/18/2008 2:48:00 PM | we need to have more resources and programs in place for the studnets who are not meeting the standards. Right now there just ins't a lot to offer a studnet sho is not meeting the criteria. The pacing we have set is so time orientated that we do not have time to reteach if we are to get through the curriculum. The kids suffer when we have to move at a faster pace because we have to get through the curriculum. What good is getting throught the curriculum if the students are not mastering what we are doing? |
| 26. | 3/18/2008 4:17:00 PM | Kind of goes hand in hand with differentiation. |
| 27. | 3/19/2008 1:22:00 PM | It's too bad that the work has been at the expense of instructional time. |
| 28. | 3/19/2008 1:50:00 PM | This makes a lot of sense to me. |
| 29. | 3/19/2008 4:54:00 PM | Slow down the amount of programs or ideas so that teachers have the time to implement them properly. It seems that the district keeps adding new items but forgets about the other strategies in place. |
| 30. | 3/19/2008 5:20:00 PM | My answer would depend upon knowing if this has been an effective strategy in our district overall... |
| 31. | 3/19/2008 5:41:00 PM | We need to ease off on this for a while and learn to work with the new things we've implemented. There's too much too fast and none of it is getting done as well as it should. We are being turned into "jacks of all trades, but masters of none." This is especially difficult for those of us who teach in two different course areas. Time to meet with and share ideas with grade level teachers is often taken up with IEPs and parent meetings, leaving little time to learn from each other. I want to do the very best that I can but feel I'm left with only time to do a "half-assed" job. |
| 32. | 3/19/2008 7:20:00 PM | This should be a tautology in education. Do we really need to establish a strategic goal in the area?!? |
| 33. | 4/8/2008 12:31:00 AM | There is still a lot to do on this goal. The work that has been done has really been positive in helping students and making departments better. Working through the questions takes time and PLC effort. Glad to see it is here. Hope we continue to get time to work on the three questions as a department. |
| 34. | 4/8/2008 1:03:00 PM | again this should be part of RTI. |
| 35. | 4/8/2008 12:26:00 PM | This will always be on-going. |
| 36. | 4/8/2008 4:21:00 PM | this is indoctirniated already, let's shift gears and focus on some bigger issues |
| 37. | 4/8/2008 5:08:00 PM | If the community understands what we are trying to provide for the students and they see it works, this will hopefully encourage them for financial support to continuing providing these opportunities to students. |
| 38. | 4/8/2008 5:18:00 PM | I would like to see engagement and relationships added to or embedded in our questions because they have an affect on assessment. What will we do if they haven't learned it? - we have focused on remediation and challenge - maybe relationships and engagement are answers to what we can do also. |
| 39. | 4/8/2008 4:59:00 PM | If we continually review our objectives and our practices to meet those objectives, I feel that the quality of our teaching will go up. |
| 40. | 4/8/2008 8:52:00 PM | The three questions are ingrained and are losing their effectiveness. Your established teachers are already doing this, and they will continue to do so because they are professionals. |
| 41. | 4/8/2008 7:58:00 PM | Again goals that address academic success should be high on the priority list. |
| 42. | 4/8/2008 10:05:00 PM | The remediation/challeng needs to be explained as being for all students and not just the low- or high-end. It applies to each student. |
| 43. | 4/10/2008 1:16:00 PM | It has become a mantra. It should continue to be a mantra. However, I think that the goal has been achieved in making it a primary element of the vocabulary/language of teachers. Now it needs to be a skill that we build upon (scaffolding) to move in the next direction. This means it has to fall in priority, but not disappear (with occasional returns to serve as a reminder to all staff). |
| 44. | 4/10/2008 4:36:00 PM | remediation is the most challenging of the three - how to distinguish between the student that studied and the one that did not study |
| 45. | 4/10/2008 6:13:00 PM | This has been a great tool to look at what we are teaching and why. |